“You have a girl?”
“No,” he answered.
The tea tasted good. It was English tea. He had some cold cornbread in his pockets. He gave me the bed and put the chairs face-to-face for himself and ht a cigarette without asking me.
“There is much literary tradition in Crawfordsville, you know. Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, died here.” He said he visited Indianapolis just to see James Whitcomb Riley, that he’d found him entertaining schoolchildren on his porch, a little girl on his lap. Mr. Riley had suggested they get drunk. And, later, they did.
“Won’t she hear us?” I said.
“She thinks I talk to myself.”
He must not have been a poet then. He talked about the provinces in France because he had been there the summer before. “Hills and peaks and castles,” he said. “Not this flat Athens of the Midwest.” He was lonely and young. You could tell that. The boys in the Teke House today would have thought him strange, a sissy. The way he dressed. He never did anything but talk to me. He told me about his friends in Pennsylvania and how he loved to take baths. There was something in his voice. The way he talked was like writing a letter. He stretched out in the chairs, throwing his head back and closing his eyes. He fretted about not being happy here or not wanting to stay in Indiana. “I shouldn’t feel that way,” he said. “I’m a nomad, you see. You are too, aren’t you? Don’t you want to stop wandering? Don’t you want to stay someplace?”
I didn’t. I suppose if I could have known about it then, I would have headed out to Hollywood. Instead, I went to sleep, listening to his voice, wondering why there are so few people with red hair. I never told his fortune. Were there leaves I could read? I was his fortune. Behind the red hair was a blue wall, and the ashtray and the tea tray were filled with cigarette butts.
I woke up the next morning and the first thing I saw was Miss Grundy, her arms full of sheets, looking as if she was disappointed I wasn’t dead. “That man,” she said. “You poor girl.” He was fired that morning by President Mackintosh. I was told Ezra begged to stay. It was understood nothing happened between us and that I was not the reason he was dismissed. The trustees thought it a charitable action, suggested Wabash was not suitable for Mr. Pound. I gave Ezra my ticket, and that night he was on his way south to Indianapolis, pillow under his arm. Miss Grundy suggested the college find me a position. Next thing you know, I was centering a canned cherry in the middle of each chocolate pudding in the TKE house.
I got a letter from him, care of Miss Grundy, a few months later. “Venice, a lovely place to come to from Crawfordsville, Ind.”
The other mothers wouldn’t care, anyway. We swap recipes, sour cream cookies and butter brickle bars. We plan menus and really worry about color on the plate. The price of tea in China. And the boys don’t dream. The ones who know who he was and that he was here, never ask me. I hear his name sometimes after English 3. Another gentleman with a girl in his room. He forgot his tie. Maybe if I was a poet, I could tell them how it was. Instead, I am quiet at my table. The only thing I’m asked about, besides the salt, is when the letters were stolen and when they were returned. And if it’s true that the skull is all that’s left of the one pledge that told the house’s secrets.
Walking through the halls at night with my Boston, I look at the annual pictures. Mine is the only face that never changes. My vanity. It is the same picture every year since the first year. That peek-a-boo look. I had skull-tight hair, veiled eyes, dark, bow lips. What a funny way to grow older and stay younger. The matting is the same every year — a circle for me, their sweetheart and their favorite. The boxes are filled with boys aging over four years like presidents in office. When I meet the real mothers during parents’ weekends, I look for the faces in those faces. The way I stare must make them uncomfortable. “Boys,” I say, “will be boys.”
I saw that Pound again in 1958 when he was in the hospital. I took my vacation that year in Washington so I could try to see him. Ever since the war, The Star had run these articles about him because he had been here once. I didn’t think I would be able to see him. I was too early at the hospital, so I waited. At two, another woman arrived. She had the profile of a face on a coin. I found out later it was his wife. She never said a thing to me but hello. She had an accent. I followed her and a man in a white coat up a metal spiral staircase. We went down a hallway. In an alcove by a window, I was introduced. He couldn’t remember me, of course. But that’s because he was sick.
“Indiana,” he said. “Elephants walking in the corn.”
He made tea. He talked about Italy. There was a chance then that they would let him go in the care of his wife. She sat with her back to the window. Other patients came up to the screen that divided us from the ward. He gave them pennies and sent them away. He wore a green visor cap like a card player or a banker. I thought of crumbs in my lap and I brushed my skirt with the side of my hand. He talked about Idaho and maybe going there. The potato.
Other people visited. They called him E.P. He talked about poetry to them. I thought then: Had I been a poem? Maybe I was a poem. The only other visitor I recall was another woman because she was from Fort Wayne. She could remember walking the tow path on the canal. She talked to him in Greek. She told me that later. Then, I was watching two of the other patients dancing. Two men, dancing.
I gave him a pound cake meaning a little joke by it, or a token of who he was.
“It’s got a pound of butter, a pound of flour, and a pound of sugar,” I told him.
He smiled at that. I knew he didn’t remember me.
I followed his wife and the other woman out of the hospital. The woman took me back downtown in her limousine.
“He’s an old fart,” she said, “but important.” She said that Wabash was a good school. “I taught in an all-girls’ school in Baltimore for years. I have never been back to Indiana. I must go back sometime before I die.” I thought that was a strange thing to say.
I went back to Indiana on a night train. The cars were powder blue, and the trip through Ohio seemed to take forever. Have you been through Ohio? I would like to say that the boys missed me, but my vacation is during initiation in the house. That is in early January. They are too busy to miss me. I would like to say too that I was important to someone, to E.P. maybe, but that would not be true. I’m simply one of the somethings that happened to him. I didn’t change myself. Or I’m left over, an extra part. The clock still runs. What happens to yeast in bread? There’s no story here. He took the stories with him. I think people think sometimes that they make up their own world. There always has to be people like me in those made-up worlds. Nothing would happen if there weren’t.
Did I tell you what I do when the nights are cold like this one? I put a big Greek letter in my bed and plug it in. The lights are so bright, they bleach the blankets. It looks like a person curled up in bed. When I get home, it is nice and toasty. I pull back the covers like I was opening a living thing. I look at the huge θ or π lighting up my bed. And my room’s all upside-down because the light’s coming from below. What does it look like? It looks like nothing else at all. It looks like a letter in a bed.